I've always loved classic pinup art. Those paintings by masters like the great Gil Elvgren were always so attractive to me, and it wasn't just because of the beautiful women in them. It was because artistically speaking they were simplifications of reality. Elvgren was especially a master of simplifying everything so that his paintings had a nice graphic quality in addition to form-based rendering.
Although I've always admired and looked up to artists who could pull off the pinup genre really well, I've never really set out to do any of my own until recently. And in this case the idea to do a pinup of Princess Jasmine from Disney's Aladdin was really more of an accident. While I was working on another painting, I got the serendipitous image of Jasmine reclining ever so sensually on her palace balcony in the moonlight. So I started sketching it out in between sessions working on my other projects and little by little I eventually finished it.
The key difference though between my pinups and those of the artists that I admire was how I wanted to depict the ladies. In most pinup art the woman is staring right at the viewer and smiling while intentionally posing for the viewer. While there's nothing wrong with that, I instead wanted to capture more intimate moments because I wanted my pinups to have a candid quality to them.
So I present to you now "Shining, Shimmering, Splendid," the first in what I'm hoping will be a long series of Disney pinups done in my style.
